


You're not Her

by OneStepShort



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Derek Hale Needs Therapy, Derek Hale Needs a Hug, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Mid-Canon, Missing Scene, Mostly Sweet, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash, Sterek headcanon, Stiles Stilinski Needs a Hug, Teen Wolf - s3e8, Teen Wolf season 3, Teen Wolf: s3e10, sterek, the overlooked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:01:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28808514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneStepShort/pseuds/OneStepShort
Summary: “Me, be quiet??? Me? Huh?” Stiles' eyes blaze with a fury unlike anything Derek’s ever seen on him. “Are you telling me what to do now? When your psychotic, mass-murdering girlfriend-- the second one you've dated, by the way-- has got my dad somewhere, tied up, waiting to be ritually sacrificed?”It has to be Stiles, doesn’t it? To see right through him, to pick out exactly what he's thinking and throw it back in his face. It’s a low blow..-How does Stiles know about Kate? The same way he knows about most things.He figures it out.
Relationships: Derek Hale & Stiles Stilinski, Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 4
Kudos: 100





	You're not Her

**Author's Note:**

> The question of how Stiles knew about Kate in this scene has always bugged me. It's never fully addressed, so I've taken matters into my own hands. 
> 
> Yes, it has been seven years since this episode of Teen Wolf Aired, but I love this pairing way too much, and I will continue to promote it until it becomes Canon. So, we all know how long I'll be on this train.

The Alpha Twins are closing in. They’re trapped in this hospital, Cora is dying, Derek is at the end of his rope, and Stiles, as usual,  _ won’t shut the fuck up.  _

“ _ Be quiet,”  _ Derek hisses. 

Stiles turns on him immediately. “Me, be quiet??? Me? Huh?” His eyes blaze with a fury unlike anything Derek’s ever seen on him. “Are you telling me what to do now? When your psychotic, mass-murdering girlfriend-- the second one you've dated, by the way-- has got my dad somewhere, tied up, waiting to be  _ ritually sacrificed _ ?”

It has to be Stiles, doesn’t it? To see right through him, to pick out exactly what he's thinking and throw it back in his face. It’s a low blow. 

Derek could send one back, but he doesn’t. He just stands there and takes it, because, well, none of it is wrong. Doesn’t sting any less, though. Stiles is too smart for his own good; when he wants to cut, he cuts deep.

.-

_ A Few Days Earlier _

“I just don't believe him.” Stiles rubbed his hand anxiously and stared out the extensive window of the loft. 

Cora gave him a questioning look. 

He turned to explain. “All right, in Miss Blake's class, we're reading Heart of Darkness, and it's in first-person, right? Narrated by Marlow. The thing is that he's an unreliable narrator. You know the details of it have changed, you know, just because of his perspective.”

She shrugged. “Well, then we heard the story from Peter's perspective…”

“Right,” Stiles interrupted, “And I don't think we got the whole story.”

Cora squinted dubiously. “So, what...? Are-are you just gonna ask Derek about the girl he fell in love with and then killed?”

Stiles sighed. “If I have to? Yeah.”

\--

In his defense, he has had worse plans. He doesn’t bother looking for the root cellar. Peter doesn’t remember where it was, and there was a lot of woods in Beacon Hills. Cora told him it was a bad idea, and it was, for multiple reasons: Derek needing time, Derek not trusting Stiles, Derek having the ability to kill him, Derek being, well, Derek. 

But they don’t have the luxury of time. Enough people are already dead, and if they need to do a speedrun through the five stages of grief, then Stiles sure as hell isn’t going to let Derek do it alone. 

“You want to come?” Stiles asked Cora. 

“I don’t think I’d be much help. We didn’t really talk about death when I was eleven.” Something flickered in her eyes, disappointment, maybe, that her brother wasn’t really her brother anymore. 

“Could be a bonding experience,” Stiles offered. 

She raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, that’s a  _ hard  _ pass.” 

Stiles ends up heading for the distillery. He’s seen it before, passing in and out of town. It’s a long shot, but it beats driving aimlessly through the woods, looking for Peter’s underground caves (because there is  _ no way  _ that asshole has an apartment) and a certain emotionally repressed werewolf. 

When Peter told him about the meeting of the Alpha pack, he’d severely understated the spiral. Ennis used all five of his claws, raking a revenge mark with a six foot diameter through the side of the building. Stiles traces the path they made. He has to spread his fingers uncomfortably wide to line up with the tears in the metal.

“Damn,” he mutters, impressed.

His eye catches on a shadow, through the gaps in the metal. Someone’s standing in the middle of the distillery, staring through the spiral. Staring at  _ him.  _

Stiles backs away quickly. He takes a deep breath. 

“Alright,” he says to himself. “No backing out now.” 

It’s definitely Derek, standing ominously in the way he does. He’s taken a few steps back, like he’s considering fleeing. Stiles just stands awkwardly in the open doorway. 

_ I really should have thought this through.  _

“You shouldn’t be here.” Alright, guess they were dispensing with pleasantries then, as usual. 

“That’s never stopped me before.” He forces himself to step forward. The shadows and the scattered moonlight set him a little on edge. He keeps walking. Derek doesn’t move, like if he stays still and quiet enough he can blend into the concrete, which might be something that werewolves do, Stiles doesn’t know. 

He stops short of Derek’s personal space. Normal conversation distance.

Derek finally bites. Figuratively, not literally. That would be weird. Well, weird _ er.  _

“How’d you find me?” He’s frustratingly difficult to read, especially under the cover of night and the years of practice he’s had speaking in monotone. 

Yeah, Stiles should probably stop thinking so flippantly about Derek’s trauma. But Stiles thinks flippantly about everything. It’s how he stays sane. 

“Peter told us about Paige.” 

Derek twitches in surprise, then his shoulders sag, like he’s just exhausted. “Course he did,” Derek mumbles, almost to himself. He turns away, and Stiles has to fight the urge to grab his shoulder and pull him back. 

“Derek…” Stiles starts, trying to find something to say to keep him from leaving. 

But Derek just goes over to sit on the ground, easing his back against one of the old distilling tanks, one knee up supporting his forearm. 

“We done here?” He asks. It’s not meant to be a question, or a request. It is a very clear neon sign that says  _ don’t fucking talk to me.  _

Stiles gets the message. He just decides to willfully ignore it, because it’s  _ Derek.  _ It’s “Get back here, you’re holding Scott down while I burn him alive” Derek, “I’m gonna show up in your room unannounced covered in blood” Derek, “Cut off my arm or I’ll cut off your head” Derek. Social boundaries were never exactly their thing. 

So he goes and he sits down right next to him. 

“Stiles -” 

“No, we’re not,” he interjects. “We’re not done.” 

Derek lets out a small, resigned sigh.

Stiles continues. “I know you blame yourself for Boyd, and Erica, and Paige, but none of them...none of them were your fault. What the Alpha pack did to them, it’s not on you.” 

Derek looks at him, his eyes doing that shifty, rapid fire scanning thing, like Stiles is completely foreign to him. 

“You came all the way here just to tell me that?” He raises his eyebrows skeptically. 

“No, I came here because Cora said you and Peter hid in a root cellar for two days and we don’t have that kind of time.” Stiles thinks he’s going to regret what he says next. “You can’t hide from this, Derek.” 

Derek visibly tenses at that. “I’m not hiding.” 

“Right, you’re just camping out in an abandoned distillery for aesthetic’s sake. Actually that is something you might do, now that I think about it.” 

“You’re wrong.” Derek says quietly. 

“I - what?” Stiles can be wrong about a lot of things, but he’s definitely right about the building matching Derek’s aesthetic. 

“It is on me. I turned them.” 

“You didn’t turn Paige,” Stiles points out. 

“I let it happen. And it killed her.” For a brief moment, his true eyes flash, the icy blue coloring his irises.  _ I killed her.  _

Stiles realizes, very suddenly and at completely the wrong time, that he has no idea what he’s doing. He went to grief counseling. When he was  _ ten.  _

_ Around the same time Paige died,  _ his brain supplies unhelpfully. 

But he has no idea how to help Derek right now. And it scares him, how much he feels like he needs to, like he  _ wants  _ to, because the thought of Derek being hurt twists his gut and leaves a sour taste in his mouth. 

“Love’s a bitch,” Stiles says, almost to himself. 

Derek actually laughs at that. It’s short and self deprecating and tired, but the sound of it startles Stiles a little. 

“You have no idea.” They’re looking at each other again now, and Stiles becomes a bit worried that he let on a lot more than he should have with those three words. 

“I have a little bit of an idea,” Stiles admits.

“You’re sixteen,” Derek says softly, and now Stiles is  _ very  _ worried, because goddamn werewolves can read him like a book. 

“Does that matter?” It’s a weak counter, Stiles knows, but it’s also a genuine question. 

Something clouds Derek’s expression. “More than you’d think.” 

And suddenly Stiles gets it. 

_ That’s where they’re keeping him, at his own house?  _

_ Not in it, under it.  _

_ Would you prefer I locked him in the basement and burned the whole house down around him?  _

“It was Kate, wasn’t it?” 

Stiles already knows the answer, because in the back of his mind, there were all those details he kept trying to work out. How Kate knew to block off the tunnel network under the Hale House, why she’d kept Derek alive as long as she did, why Derek knew so little about his sister’s investigation into the fire. Why he always seemed to carry a borderline masochistic level of guilt with him. 

He was the accomplice, just like Harris. But unlike their beloved chemistry teacher, he wasn’t wasted at a bar. He was drunk on something much more potent. 

Derek’s small nod confirms it. 

“You’re not her,” Stiles feels the need to say it, hoping Derek will understand what he means. 

“I know,” Derek murmurs. 

He's lying. 

.-

Stiles stares into Derek’s eyes, chest heaving with anger. The comment slips out before he can stop it, all venom, all bite. 

_ The Second one you’ve dated, by the way.  _

He sees the flicker of hurt, and he immediately regrets it. But he’s on a roll now, the panic and terror lighting a fire in his gut, and he just can’t seem to stop. 

“And they want her, right?” He flails at the general absence of Ms. Blake in the room. “Which means now,  _ we _ don't have her either, so my dad and Cora are both  _ dead.” _

“Not yet,” Scott tells him resolutely. He and Peter go to examine Cora. Derek just looks at him, a mixture of concern and contempt in his eyes, the kind of paradox only he can pull off. Stiles recognizes it, it’s the same look he gave Ms. Blake when he first saw her real face, the one slashed up and scarred. 

_ When someone you care about betrays you, and you still can’t bear to see them hurt.  _ He swallows down that terrifying thought. 

They have bigger problems. 

The Alpha Twins roar in the distance. 

Much bigger. 


End file.
